Communications Detour

for Black Mesa

The military has hindered your progress by shutting down a communications array on the far side of the facility.

You need to power up the communications tower in order to re-establish a communication link with the scientists held up in the Lambda Complex.

Basic Details

Title: Communications Detour

File Name: 550171554.vpk

Size : 62.98MB

Author: Skyms2663

Date Released: 08 November 2015

Retail Version

This map was built for the retail version of Black Mesa. I do not know if it works with the mod version. For more information about this type of release, please see the Black Mesa Workshop section on the About page.

First time trying a Black Mesa custom map, and I say it was a good introduction to it.

The map has suitable flow, especially at the starting areas, getting the base weapons and fighting some more basic enemies, before killing your first soldier and getting your main arsenal before holding off a ambush.

I would prefer the arenas to be better, give the player access to all areas the enemy is and give more room to play with, I just crouched behind the counter and popped up to shoot every so often, even with the room being so small, the shotgun was pretty useless there.

Helicopter fight was okay, had the rockets, ammo and the heli, kinda remembered the critque Phill gave me on my HL2 ep2 map, felt kinda forced.

Couple bugs, saw some texture glitches, one door by the radio tower I spent ages trying to open because the pad was lit up with a green light, found out it was not the right way after I walked through the door due to lack of collision just to find a rock wall behind it.

However the level design was strong, did not get lost, found the secrets and had fun, definable worth a play.

I really like these new BM map-mod addons. Here I really enjoyed the quick fun short map.

Combat was quite predictable but the lovely BM weapons worth the effort a million times!

I really don’t know why the whole visuals were not at a 100% for me. I got very raw and not polished textures, though i fixed once i set up the video options at the highest level.

The final battle against the Apache, was a cool one, but that chopper was hard to hit most of the time. The end is a boring and not challenging backtracking part, but it just closes the map OK right at when you started.

It is a fun little map with strong attention to the visual aspects though they’re not that spectacular compared to some of the Black Mesa maps or another lovely custom map called “Bravado”.

In any case it does offer 20 to 30 minutes of fun so go ahead and play it.

Pro:
-Lovely map feels like Black Mesa with strong outside areas.
-Few neat scripts in use like some planes passing by over your head.
-Nice fight against a chopper though not ground breaking.
-Good Introduction with a picture and custom text so you know exactly what to do.

Contra:
-Few bugs remaining.Personal note: A door which has no collision, a cliff with a rift in it (void)

Communications Detour is a good little map that I enjoyed playing through.

The map revolves around reactivating a communications tower so Gordon can continue on his way to the Lambda Complex. The journey takes the player through exterior canyons and interior office environments where they fight a mix of alien and human opponents, culminating in a chopper battle at the tower itself before backtracking to the start where the level ends. The map has an interesting layout and overall pleasing aesthetic, with special mention going to the opening canyon area. Combat encounters are nicely set up and fairly well balanced and the environment has enough detailing to bring the world to life and be fun to explore.

However this map does have some rough edges and lacks a certain degree of polish. Much of this is nit-picking and I won’t go over here (if anyone’s really interested they can read my discussion post in this maps Black Mesa workshop entry). The main complaint is the final parts of the map. The chopper fight at the tower is awkward and the backtracking is a bit bland and unintuitive.

To sum up this is a well-designed and enjoyable map which, while suffering from a slight lack of polish, is well worth playing.